30 June 2011 1:31 PM

I just want to give notice here that I shall shortly (early next week, I hope) be responding to a challenge from Tim Wilkinson who, on his blog ‘Surely Some Mistake’ has set out his reasons for opposing my call for the proper enforcement of penal laws against the possession of drugs, notably cannabis. I think anyone with a search engine can find their way there, and it would be useful if readers here were familiar with the arguments which Mr Wilkinson has put, before I get started.

This debate, by the way, is by arrangement. We have a friend in common who suggested that we should discuss this matter. Mr Wilkinson is of course welcome to post replies here as well as on his own site. I shall post my arguments here, and nowhere else.

I am now in the early stages of wriitng my planned next book ‘The War We Never Fought’, which examines the secret surrender of the British establishment to the cannabis lobby in the late 1960s, and the results of this surrender. So I am particularly looking forward to this exchange.

Let us see if we can keep the Atheist Bores from turning it into a linguistic battle over the difference between ‘not believing in God’ and ‘believing there is no God’. I am pleased to see that so far they haven’t hijacked the discussion on World War two, but I’m not sure this can last much longer.

Share this article:

27 June 2011 5:44 PM

During some recent long train and plane journeys I’ve read three powerful works of modern history. The first is Michael Burleigh’s ‘Moral Combat’, often advanced as an answer to the doubts of people like me about the moral purity of World War Two.

Then I turned to ‘The Third Reich in Power’ by Richard Evans, the second volume of his trilogy which examines the Hitler period. This is particularly interesting because most general books on the subject concentrate on Hitler’s coming to power and on the war. This one goes into rather more detail about how National Socialism operated and achieved its ends.

Finally, I read ‘To End All Wars’ by Adam Hochschild, a revelatory and almost wholly fresh study of opposition( such as it was) to the First World War.

The first thing I’d like to say is that Hochschild actually made me change my mind. I have for many years crabbily resisted attempts to rehabilitate the soldiers shot for desertion during the 1914-18 war. I took the view that the great majority did what they believed to be their duty, and that those who didn’t couldn’t and shouldn’t be accorded the same status.

But his account of the treatment of several of these cases completely overturned my view. I now feel that I was quite wrong, and withdraw what I have said in the past. These men most certainly deserve to be honoured. The truth is that I have suspected this for years, and should have shifted long ago, but it took the incidents in this book to push me over the hump.

I would also say that Hochschild more or less demolishes any remaining justification for fighting this war at all. My only disappointment is that he gives far less space than he ought to Viscount Lansdowne’s attempt to call for a negotiated peace, which if heeded might have saved the world from much (there is a moment in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ where Lansdowne’s failure is noted as a turning point of modern history, a vast conservative failure and one of the reasons for the Fordist revolution which wiped out history, privacy, the family and religion).

I realised as a small boy in late 1950s Britain that the First World War had destroyed an order that was in many ways admirable. It was obvious, from studying the ancient pre-1914 volumes of ‘Punch’ in my prep school library, that the world before the battle of Mons was calmer, sweeter, more settled and in many important ways happier than what followed. These books were not trying to give this impression. Like old advertisements and guide books, they gave a disarmingly frank impression of how people actually felt and lived at the time. People will tell me about slums, the crudities of empire, malnutrition and so forth, and they will be right. But isn’t it false to imagine that the world would have remained exactly the same in all ways.

Without the war, we could have made plenty of social progress, perhaps more. Above all, we would not have lost all those men, the flower of their generation, who volunteered for what they thought was a fine cause. Not to mention avoiding the Russian coup d’etat - and Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mussolini remaining obscure and unknown failures till their lives’ ends.

Here I’ll turn briefly to ‘The Third Reich in Power’, which seemed to me to show that the National Socialist regime was far more socially radical than its present-day critics like to acknowledge. Its cult of youth was a particular menace to proper education, as it stripped power from teachers – and parents - and gave it to aggressive Hitler Youths. I still feel the lack of a really thorough look at this movement in English (if anyone knows of one, I’d be grateful) as it played a huge part in undermining religion and destroying parental influence, and was also pretty relaxed (as were most of the Nazi hierarchy) about premarital and extramarital sex. Though it is from Michael Burleigh’s book that I learned that Nazi Germany’s 1936 divorce laws accepted ‘irretrievable breakdown’ as a ground for divorce, 33 years ‘ahead’ of Britain’s decision to do the same. The idea that National Socialism was a form of conservatism, or allied to it, really does not stand up to much examination.

It had, in these areas, plenty in common with the Communist regime in Stalin’s USSR.

And it could not progress without coming into severe conflict with the churches, a conflict which would have been far more virulent had Hitler and his government survived longer than the 12 years they actually had.

It was also deeply hostile to the rule of law, and to the independence of the courts. Likewise the universities, the professions, the newspapers, were all ingested in much the same way that a left-wing totalitarian regime would have used. The mass robbery of the Jews was, as in all revolutionary expropriation, a convenient way of rewarding the revolutionary party’s supporters, with money and jobs.

The conduct of political conservatives was often shameful and generally mistaken, though they could not know the horrible future. Many of the clergy were too narrowly concerned with their own interests and never widened their attacks to encompass the regime as a whole. Mind you, nor did anybody else.

But Franz von Papen’s Marburg speech, and the Vatican’s secret distribution of its ‘Mit Brennende Sorge’ document, were both startlingly bold challenges to the National Socialists, which infuriated Hitler and provoked severe reprisals. The left were also often courageous (I have mentioned here the extraordinary courage of the Social Democrat Otto Wels in the final hours of a free Reichstag) , but the Communists in particular behaved as stupidly (if not more so) than the German conservatives. I think it important to note that conservatives and Christians resisted, and were attacked for their resistance. I still gasp with sheer astonishment at the aristocratic scorn for the Gestapo repeatedly shown by Cardinal Archbishop Graf von Galen, whose story should be better known. He defied Hitler over many subjects, in public, but I would like to note here that one of his fiercest battles was against the National Socialist euthanasia programme.

This brings me to Michael Burleigh’s disappointing book. Far from being a thorough retort to ( say ) A.C.Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’, which I discussed here last year, it seems to me to miss the point made by most of those who condemn the bombing of German civilians.

What we are *not* saying is that this bombing was the moral equivalent of the massacre of the Jews. It was not, and those in Germany or elsewhere who have attempted to suggest any such thing are not my allies.

What we are saying is that war fought in this way, and in alliance with the wholly immoral USSR, cannot continue to be exalted as some sort of holy conflict.

This alleged holiness obscures an honest assessment of its rights and wrongs, leads to an emotional rather than a rational analysis of Britain’s part in it, and leads to silly evasion of responsibility for actions which ought never to have been taken. It also leads to the perpetual misuse of the 1939-45 war as the model for modern interventionist diplomacy – a model based on a wholly wrong understanding of why and how we fought the 1939-45 war.

In my attempt (last year) to discuss the timing and purpose of Britain’s entry into the war, so mistimed that it nearly got us subjugated, I ran into an emotional blockage from many readers who simply could not get past the frayed and increasingly insupportable myth of the ‘Finest Hour’. This is always coupled with a standard set of beliefs about the occupation of the Rhineland and the later Munich crisis, in which it is assumed that a serious alternative policy was a) available at the time and b) practicable at the time and c) would have led to a better outcome.

Thus they could not properly examine the incompetence of British diplomacy in the late 1930s, and its absolute nadir, the ludicrous and dishonest guarantee to Poland, which allowed Colonel Beck, at his desk in Warsaw, to decide when or if we went to war with Germany ( and why).

One of my critics was reduced to inventing non-existent declarations by Hitler and non-existent intelligence documents, in trying to show that Hitler would have attacked Britain in 1940 whatever we had done. Unflattering as it is for our national ego, I don’t think he cared enough.

Until we can start looking at 1939 with the dispassionate coolness rightly used to examine the 1914-18 war, we won’t be able to make sense of it and (in my opinion) we will not cure ourselves of the urge to go out and bomb countries such as Libya for their own good.

A few thoughts about the Burleigh book. First some quibbles. He says (on page 489) that German bombers ‘achieved a firestorm’ in Coventry on 14-15 November 1940. I had never heard this before and do not think it true. Coventry was a filthy massacre, but not a firestorm. He also (I am genuinely baffled by this in someone who spends so much time researching German history) states (on page 550) that ‘FDR’ stands for the Federal Republic of Germany. It doesn’t, in English or German. The error is repeated in the paperback.

These are minor niggles, but they made me uncomfortable. It is more important when he uses words as he does about those who disagree with him, for example (p.487) ‘Sir Arthur Harris, bête noire of the moral-equivalence claque’.

Well, if there is such a claque, Sir Arthur may well be its bete noire. But he is also the bête noire of people who compare the casualty rate among his airmen to that at the Somme in 1916, and to those who, having no belief in moral equivalence, and are not a ‘claque’, even so think that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was wrong in itself (and also that it was ineffectual, though it would have been wrong even if it hadn’t been).

The same rather blustering tone is to be found when he (on page 501) attacks ‘Moralistic arguments that selected some but not all aspects of war fighting’.

In a book entitled ‘Moral Combat’, it seems a bit odd to be so dismissive. Aren’t such arguments simply ’moral’ rather than moralistic? Isn’t that how they are conducted? Isn’t the existence of a moral rule about just war the whole reason for his book?

In another baffling passage he praises Archbishop Cosmo Lang on the grounds that he ‘had the good sense to know that clerics had no special competence to comment in these issues’ (area bombing).He says this was: ‘a humility lost on some of his contemporaries and successors’.(502-3).

Surely the ‘competence’ involved was as guardians of the national religion, whose merciful character was presumably one of the reasons why Mr Burleigh thinks it a good thing that we won the war rather than the other side. I am not quite sure what ‘competence’ is needed to judge the morals of a military or other government action.

But he then launches (p.503) an extraordinary assault on George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and the principal opponent of the bombing of civilians. He attacks Bell’s belief that not all Germans were bad as ’an idea that primarily appealed to those who had hobnobbed at All Souls with well-mannered aristocratic Germans rather than with Nazi thugs’ .

Did it? Bell is also attacked (p. 504) for being ‘more than slightly in love withhis self-image as a brave dissenter’.

Was he?

He is also accused of ‘vanity’. Was he vain? How do we know?

Bell’s Church critics, on the other hand, are presented as ‘thoughtful’, possessing ‘common-sense realism’ and ‘tinged with a theologically coherent pessimism about the human condition, denied to such as Bell’.

Well, if Bishops aren’t competent to discuss war, then are historians competent to issue judgements on theological coherence? And aren’t historians, especially the sort who write mass—market books about war ever the teeniest bit vain? There’s a very handsome study of Mr Burleigh on the back cover flap. This is polemic, not history, and it doesn’t really face the arguments made by Grayling, let alone refute them.

Actually, the book is still rather good, and everyone should read it. Its facts, especially on the squalid, savage nature of our Soviet ally, are often powerful. In fact, as long as he sticks to the facts, Mr Burleigh is a great read with much new and interesting research well-assembled . I just don’t think his book really answers Bishop Bell, who for all his alleged vanity, said at the time and at his own considerable cost, what he believed to be right – and what future generations will come in time to believe was right.

Share this article:

26 June 2011 1:08 AM

The flag-wrapped coffins of dead servicemen are to be driven out of the back gate of RAF Brize Norton when it takes over from Lyneham (a few weeks from now) as the arrival point for the fallen.

They will then be routed down side roads to avoid nearby Carterton – a town almost exactly the same size as Wootton Bassett – and make their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford along A-roads and bypasses. There’ll be a small guard of honour near the hospital entrance (there already is) but somehow or other the cortege won’t go down any High Streets.

I will tell you in a moment what the official excuses are for this. I should have thought the mere words ‘back gate’ would tell most people all they need to know about this decision.

And despite the Prime Minister’s oily award of the title ‘Royal’ to Wootton Bassett, you can bet that he’d much rather the public scenes of grief and remembrance in that place had never happened, and that nobody noticed the frequent deaths his weakness and political cowardice are causing.

In the same way, the Defence Ministry has almost completely succeeded in covering up the appalling numbers of men who have been gravely injured in Afghanistan because the Government hasn’t the guts to quit this meaningless war. We hardly ever see them. Were they all to be assembled in one photograph, the nation would demand instant withdrawal and probably get it.

The official version is that the families of the dead will be using a new ‘Repatriation Centre’ at Brize Norton, and that it is near the back gate. Routing the hearses through the base might disrupt its normal operations.

And here’s what was said by Andrew Robathan, whose stirring title is ‘Minister for Defence Personnel, Welfare and Veterans’. Speaking to Radio Oxford, he explained: ‘The side gate was seen by the Ministry of Defence and the police as the most appropriate way to take out future corteges.’

I love that word ‘appropriate’, the favourite adjective of those who have quietly forsaken the idea that there are such things as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

He continued: ‘I am not sure taking coffins in hearses past schools, past families, past married quarters is necessarily the thing that everybody would wish to see . . . the focus must be on the families of the dead service personnel. They are the people who care most. That is where our focus is.’

This is a curious statement. None of us exactly ‘wishes’ to see a funeral going by. But surely death should not be hidden away. And surely it is right that all of us – especially the young and service families – should be reminded of the price of courage and duty, and given the opportunity to salute these fine things.

You can believe the various official excuses. Or you might recall that until (in April 2008) this newspaper highlighted the way the hearses were left to fight their way through indifferent traffic, even cut up by impatient motorists at roundabouts, they did not get a police escort for the final few miles to the hospital.

Mr Cameron says that he will do the talking about war, and the commanders should do the fighting. Well, he may have a point there, or he would if he were not militarily and diplomatically clueless.

But he might also mention that while he is doing the talking, real men are doing the dying, and their families are doing the weeping.

Personally, I don’t think he or his Government colleagues are grown-up enough to pay the price of their own vanity and bombast. So they sneak the dead out by the back gate, and hope it doesn’t get on the TV.

Slaughtered...by our side

You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher: ‘In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more. Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.’

The previous day, Martin had written from the scene of an air strike in Souk- al-Juma, which is a centre of opposition to Colonel Gaddafi: ‘In the rooms still standing there were beds, a freezer full of food, plastic flowers, clothes, cushions and a children’s bedroom with a cot, bunks and a yellow teddy bear. The apartments had clearly been civilian and were manifestly in a residential area... There was no sign of any military or government installation. Locals insisted that there were none.’

Our side did these things. I have left out some more gruesome details of the dead and injured. Since our only official justification for intervening in Libya is to ‘protect civilians’, why haven’t these undoubted incidents led to an emergency debate in Parliament on our involvement in this cack-handed, bird-brained adventure?

It’s fathers we’re demonising

If I make a reasoned case against state subsidies for fatherless families, I am immediately, and falsely, accused by Tories and other Leftists of ‘demonising single mothers’.

As it happens, I think single mothers make an entirely rational decision, based on the existing benefits system and the divorce laws. So we should change the system, and reform divorce.

If David Cameron makes a weird, puce-faced attack on absent fathers, he is taken seriously by a largely sycophantic media. Read what the Prime Minister says. It is – and I am being mild here – actually unhinged. It is close to an incitement to violence, and if violence follows it, then I think the victims should make sure that Mr Cameron’s outburst is considered by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Here goes. These are the actual words of the Queen’s First Minister, and Controller of the Nuclear Button: ‘We need to make Britain a genuinely hostile place for fathers who go AWOL. It’s high time runaway dads were stigmatised, and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be looked at like drink drivers, people who are beyond the pale.’

He wouldn’t dare say any such thing about the many women who deliberately set out to bring up children without fathers, and he was careful to sugar his statement with exaggerated praise for ‘heroic’ single mothers. The deep anti-male, politically correct bias in our culture has grown markedly worse since the Tory Party was captured by Mr Cameron and his rich liberal friends.

Can pills really make you a racist bigot?

A pitiful creature called John Galliano is given to mad, insulting outbursts in Paris bars. He has been filmed speaking of his love for Hitler and his, er, dislike of Jews.

Even his friends in the fashion world, who know more about handbags than about Hitler, can see that this is not a good look.

He has sought to excuse his behaviour by pointing out that he is, or has been, ‘addicted’ to various pills.

Two points here. There is no such thing as addiction, which is a fancy name for human weakness. If the pills are bad for him, then it’s his responsibility not to take them.

And isn’t it rather far-fetched to suggest that a few pills can turn a decent person into an anti-Jewish bigot?

---More proof that the BBC are willing to believe anything bad about Israel. On June 18, the Corporation’s website published a laughably unlikely story claiming that Rabbis in Jerusalem had sentenced a dog to death by stoning. It was false from nose to tail and had been retracted, with apologies, by the Israeli newspaper that first published it, days before the BBC picked it up (without checking) from a French news agency, and a website.

It’s partly because of this hopeless bias – Israel bad, Arabs good – that the BBC hardly ever mentioned the tyranny, corruption and political squalor of the Arab world before it became impossible to ignore in the spring.

Share this article:

23 June 2011 11:29 AM

Christopher Charles states: ’Annie was sexually abused by her father from the age of 11 to 16. She bore him a child which was taken into care. Unable to bear the abuse any longer, Annie let herself fell into the clutches of a man twice her age who it transpired was a pimp. She was prostituted out to five or six men a day and was anaesthetised with heroin. She became an addict. She has carried on being an addict for the next twenty years. [She is now in her late thirties and has been in and out of prison countless times.] Finally by dint of her own efforts and that of outside agencies she has finally got herself drug free. 'Annie' [I've changed her name] is one of thousands. Ask any social worker or health visitor or prison officer. And PH has the effrontery to claim that 'all' addicts submit to their addiction willingly. He needs to get out more and talk to some real people before loftily proclaiming such loathsome prejudices as though they bore the stamp of fact.’

Let us examine this statement. It begins with a series of repellent criminal assaults on ‘Annie’. I am, I must say, dismayed that the ‘abuse’ continued after the incestuous child was taken into care, for presumably by then the authorities knew of the abuse and the culprit should have been in prison for a long stretch. There he could not have continued the abuse. . Perhaps he, too, had lots of excuses for his behaviour and so was left at liberty by our excuse-making injustice system, to continue abusing his daughter. I hope nobody imagines that I am in favour of that.

The assaults on ‘Annie’ are appalling. But Mr Charles seems to assume that these events have robbed ‘Annie’ of the power to choose.

Note how in this account ‘Annie’ is always the subject of passive verbs, or a person apparently without a will of her own. She ‘lets herself fall’. She is ‘prostituted’. Mr Charles is so used to making excuses for wrongdoing that he does not write, as I would have done, that the father of this girl abused her. He writes that she was abused by him. Even someone whose actions he must hate or despise is not described in the active voice, the passive having become so habitual in his excuse-making mind.

In the world of excuses, everybody is passive, nobody has any power of will, decision or resistance, all is fore-ordained by previous abuse, maltreatment etc, back to the beginning of time. Nobody is ever responsible, and none of us has any duty to overcome evil circumstances.

Annie now ‘lets herself fall’ into the clutches of a pimp. Lets herself fall? Did she have no choice about this? The language is obscure, and I believe deliberately so.

She ‘was prostituted’. How exactly is this different from ‘she decided to become a prostitute’. Was she forced? How? Was there truly no choice in our welfare state? Did she never have any opportunity to take up any other life? The passive, will-free language, crammed with the assumption that nobody is ever to blame for anything they do, makes it impossible to tell.

And then she ‘was anaesthetised’ with heroin. Anaesthetised? Against what? By whom? Was a professional anaesthetist present? Was it a measured dose? Did she consent? Or was she held down by force while the drug was administered?

Bah. Humbug. Tell us what actually happened in good honest English, would you please, Mr Charles.

This slippery, misleadingly medicalised , passive euphemism tells us nothing about the crucial events. I suspect that this is because it would confirm my original statement that so annoyed Mr Charles, namely that all heroin abusers take the drug because they want to, because they enjoy taking it, in spite of the fact that they are well aware it is both illegal and wrong.

I do not in fact ‘claim’ that ‘addicts’ ‘submit to their “addiction” willingly’. I should have thought Mr Charles would know by now that I do not believe that there is any such thing as addiction, an excuse made up for people who are not prepared to control their appetites for harmful pleasures. Nor is what say a ‘claim’. If Mr Charles has any objective evidence for the existence of a medical condition which could be called ‘addiction’, in any way distinguishable from a weak will, I would like to hear it.

One other thing

The wearisome obtuseness of atheist bores would be funny if it didn’t take up so much space. Why can’t these people just accept that belief or unbelief in God is a choice? Why can’t they accept that they have chosen unbelief because they greatly dislike and fear the idea that their private actions may be judged by an absolute standard?

Well, the answer to that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? That would involve admitting that their belief is a selfish scuttle away from justice, rather than a grand assertion of intellectual purity. Hence their flight from the idea of choice, and the shutdown of their logical processes anywhere near the point where this might need to be acknowledged.

The daft ‘argument’ about change in someone’s pocket could only be advanced by someone who had wilfully misunderstood this point. It is possible to discover by objective enquiry how much change someone has in his pocket. It is not possible to discover if God exists.

Gosh, is that clear now? Of course not.

The wilful closure of a human mind is a tragic thing.

For example: I’m told: ‘You have said that if I asked you how much money I had in my pocket and you did not know, you could 'choose' to believe that it was £4.20.’

No, I haven’t. The choice only exists because the truth cannot be objectively determined. The person has to invent statements I have never made, and could not have made, to support his dismal ‘argument.

Share this article:

21 June 2011 8:26 AM

I will turn in a moment to comments on this week’s column. But first I’d like to take up once more a discussion we had last week about ‘anger’ in debate. This arises from my appearance on Sunday on BBC1’s ‘The Big Questions’, which is still on the iPlayer if anyone wishes to watch it.

The second half of the discussion was devoted to the Israeli-Arab question. I repeated the arguments I made in my article from Gaza last autumn, which was posted here. But the Palestinian case was put mainly by a man in a chequered keffiyeh scarf and matching tie, and by a female alleged comedian from Glasgow who made several interjections along the standard propaganda lines of the current anti-Israel campaign.

Were either or both of these people consumed with anger? Would those who make this claim about my public appearances (with the intention of invalidating my arguments) make the same claim about either of them? I would be interested to know.

My suspicion is that they would not. Most people are perfectly happy to see their own opinions forcefully and passionately expressed, and I would imagine my critics have pretty much swallowed the current anti-Israel orthodoxy of the blathering classes. Yet in one of these cases I think the speaker actually damaged his cause by being so impassioned. Nor did he have the excuse that he needed to shout to get heard. He had been given a prominent position, his own microphone and a pretty-much-guaranteed major role in the discussion.

In answer to comments, I called the author Sir Terence Pratchett because he chose to accept a knighthood. As far as I know, it was given in that form, and if it hadn’t been, it would have been absurd. The formulation ‘Sir Terry’ is ridiculous and incongruous, and if people don’t wish to be addressed by their full names they shouldn’t accept titles of honour.

I have heard the position of the new atheists well summed up elsewhere as ‘God doesn’t exist – and I hate Him!’ But I wasn’t aware that Sir Terence (whose books I have not felt compelled to finish, or explore further, after sampling one or two) had said he hated God for not existing. Both positions are of course nonsensical. Sir Terence has no idea if God exists or not, and can believe in Him tonight if he chooses to do so. You cannot hate someone who is not there.

My own view is that both believers and atheists fear that God exists, but believers also hope that he does. The passion which atheists devote the subject suggests (as such passion almost invariably does) a grave uncertainty underneath. So do the linguistic and debating tricks employed by some atheist bores (and there is no more expert and accomplished room-emptier than one of these) to strip them of any responsibility for their religious opinions, which they have somehow been ‘forced’ into.

Mr ‘Avid Fan’ tells me I am self-righteous and asks me to assert that his grandmother is better off now than if she’d committed suicide some years ago. He interprets her stated wish to join her late husband, when she was still coherent, as a desire to do so. Or so it seems to me.

I believe that the Christian religion (though not Judaism) has set its canon against self-slaughter. I am also (incidentally) haunted by a macabre Charles Williams story in which a man kills himself and finds that nothing has happened except that he is exactly where he was before, only in a perceptibly darker, more sinister version of the world he was attempting to leave, populated by others like himself, and with a rope still uncomfortably round his neck. What if suicide, far from being an escape, is a way deeper into the woe that takes us there?

For me, therefore, there is no choice in the matter. It is something I must not do, and must not aid another to do. Others are in a different position, especially if it becomes legal to assist suicide. Would I be let off if (for instance) I were in some state of unutterable despair which was not of my own making – say in the midst of being tortured slowly to death in some despot’s dungeon? I like to think so. But I don’t know.

One of the main reasons for this prohibition, though not the principal one, is (I think) the unending puzzled grief and guilt which suicide leaves behind it.

Many old and bereaved people speak longingly of their wish to rejoin their lifelong companion. Many others just speak of their wish to be dead. Yet very few of them take their own lives, even so, though they have the power to do so.

I am not sure it is self-righteous to advance the arguments I set out. Did Mr Avid Fan ever ask his grandmother if he could help her achieve this end, which would be the logical conclusion of thee view he now expresses? I have to say that I very much doubt it, and it is easy to imagine why he didn’t. Most of us, self-righteous or no, would feel there was something grotesque and ugly about such an offer, even made out of kindness. And we might also suspect that the answer would be pretty brusque (old, ill people can be surprisingly forceful when they choose). In which case is it fair to use her statement of wistful longing as a retrospective justification for sending her into the Big Sleep now?

One of the problems with senility and dementia, as with many other states of being on the fringe of life, is that we have little or no idea of what the person is actually feeling and experiencing. My own suspicion is that the horrible mismatch between bodily decay and mental decay which makes so many final years so ghastly to behold is a consequence of our modern way of life and of modern medicine’s futile ability to prolong physical existence without being able to prolong health. But that does not permit us to look at the result and say we will deal with it with a lethal injection, a plastic bag or a dose of barbiturates.

There should be far more hospice places, far more concentration on making death more bearable for the dying and for those who love them. But modern medicine, which strives with enormous officiousness to keep people alive up to a certain point, becomes cold and dismissive once they are old. I suspect that many old people are now effectively starved and thirsted to death, while many others are connected to the morphine pump , ostensibly to relieve their pain with no real expectation that they will ever wake up.

In answer to Mr Perrin, this country will not leave the EU until a political party committed to this object is elected with a clear majority. I have explained at length how that could be brought about. It starts with the destruction of the Tory Party. I do not believe in referendums, and am uninterested in the futile Euro-elections to the Brussels Supreme Soviet. Why give this farce legitimacy by taking part in it?

Juries (as described at length in my ‘Abolition of Liberty’, in the chapter ‘Twelve Angry Persons’) used to be selected on the basis of a property qualification, which was in effect an age and education barrier. When this was got rid of, nothing was done to replace it because the government were afraid to do so. Anything they suggested was bound to offend someone. At the time, the minimum voting age was 21, which is bad enough. It is now 18, and may well soon be 16, which will mean 16-year-old jurors.

I was astonished at the age of the woman Fraill. But it did seem to me that a combination of age and educational qualification would be enough to rule out most such people.

Though I am in principle a defender of juries, I sometimes think that the liberal elite has set out to make them look silly and ineffectual, as part of a long-term campaign (which is undoubted, see ‘the Abolition of Liberty’) to get rid of them altogether so that our legal system can be fully merged with that of the EU (where proper independent juries are unknown outside the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic).

A Mr ‘maccamfc’ , in a posting on the frontiers of literacy and coherence, says he ‘became’ a heroin ‘addict’ as if this was beyond his control, and he caught this affliction as one might catch flu. I do not believe this was the case. He started taking heroin, as all heroin abusers do, because he enjoyed it and wanted to, well knowing that it was both illegal and wrong.

No doubt I shall be accused of being callous towards this individual. I don’t think so. It is the wilful drugtaker who is callous to his family and neighbours, not the person who condemns this selfishness and seeks to deter it with punishment.

Whether I am ‘upper class’ or not ( lower upper middle class is my own self-description), I bet his working class neighbours and family have had plenty of cause to regret his choice, even if he thinks he hasn’t. Though I doubt he would admit to that, and he writes under a pseudonym so he needn’t take full responsibility for the truth of his posting.

He also asks us to believe that while he enjoyed himself taking this very expensive drug, which tends, ah, to undermine the work ethic, he was able to support himself for many years (17 by my calculation) and not to rob anyone else. Why, in that case is he now taking methadone, paid for by me and many others out of taxes we would rather spend on something good and useful? Why didn’t he just stop taking heroin, far easier to give up than cigarettes? I have no idea if he is poor. He is certainly undeserving.

Neil Saunders should be aware of the reason why capital punishment is different from abortion and euthanasia.

To be justly executed, you have to be found guilty of a particularly heinous murder by an impartial jury, to fail in repeated appeals and to be refused a reprieve by the Home Secretary after careful individual consideration of all aspects of your case..

To be aborted or euthanised, you just have to be weak and inconvenient.

Share this article:

19 June 2011 12:48 AM

There's only one suicide I would cheerfully assist. If the Tory Party wants to go to Zurich and end it all, I will accompany it, hold its hand, help it swallow a cocktail of poison, refuse its pleas for water at the last moment (for its own good, of course) and listen to its death gurgles. It would be a mercy.

But the Tory Party is just a rather slippery and dishonest organisation. There’s nothing immoral about pushing it gently but firmly through the dark door marked ‘Exit’. In fact I’d have fewer qualms about that than I would about putting down an elderly guinea pig.

Any human being, by contrast, is immensely, uniquely valuable. We cannot kill our fellow creatures, except under very special circumstances of self-defence or deterrent justice.

And yet we do. And we will do so even more quite soon. A society that baulks fussily at the death penalty for guilty murderers has become adept at excusing the convenient killing of innocents.

Using the advanced techniques of a perverted science, we hunt down imperfect babies in the womb and kill them. Or we kill perfect babies because their birth might disrupt our comfy lives. And we tell ourselves that it is all right because our victims aren’t fully human, though in our hearts we know they are.

When the law which permits this massacre was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, we were told that it would be for exceptional and very difficult cases only. I do not know if those who campaigned for the change really believed that – but their opponents warned that it would lead to abortion on demand. And that is what happened, because that is what suited the baby-boom generation to which I belong.

Now that generation and its children (the ones who weren’t aborted) have a new fear and a new desire. And the BBC – the voice of the boomers – has begun to express their secret concern, louder and louder. The old are a burden. They must die sooner, in the interests of the State, and of the middle-aged.

Couldn’t you see the unspoken thought – that it might be more convenient for the old and ill to be hurried into the grave – lurking behind the black-clad figure of Sir Terence Pratchett as he presented his pro-death programme at the licence-payers’ expense last week?

Sir Terence is no doubt innocent of such thoughts himself, and motivated entirely by understandable fears of his own Alzheimer’s. But there must be many homes in this country where men and women are secretly hoping that their parents will die in a reasonable, timely manner – and above all that they will not consume their inheritance with endless care-home fees before they go.

Unhappily, many of those parents may also be guiltily wondering if they should hang on to life when it means that the home they have bought over many years of careful saving may have to be sold to pay for their care, instead of being passed on to their offspring.Meanwhile, the State is consumed with a similar fear, that the NHS may fall to pieces trying to cope with the coming wave of old people living on into their 90s and demanding ever more care, space and medicine. It is this fear that lies behind the current frenzied attempts at reform. Taxation simply will not pay for it.

I predict that if assisted suicide is made available here, it will gradually become commonplace, just as abortion did. And it will not necessarily stay voluntary. In the Netherlands, that supposed paradise of liberal thought, there are about 1,000 instances every year of a patient’s life being ended by a doctor, without an explicit request. As a brilliant analysis of the issue by Professor John Keown, of Georgetown University in Washington DC, states: ‘Dutch courts have held that just as the relief of suffering can justify the termination of patients who request euthanasia, it can equally justify the termination of those who cannot.’

And once it is commonplace, as with abortion, those who oppose it will be a noisy but powerless minority, because so many of us will have become accomplices in kindly murder, that we will not dare to call it murder, and will get angry with those who do. But it will be murder all the same.

New signs, same lousy schools

Education Secretary Michael Gove has just declared that another batch of schools are to become ‘academies’. I’ve yet to see any proof that ‘academies’ are better than other schools, though they have nice new signboards. But at this rate, all the schools in the country will be ‘academies’ by the time Mr Gove has finished – and no doubt all the children will be above average, and all the exam results will be ‘As’ and ‘A-stars’.

And still nobody will know anything. The really sad thing about this is that Michael Gove is an intelligent man, who knows this is all rubbish and window-dressing. In fact, he is himself window-dressing for a government that couldn’t care less about the schooling of the poor.

Is it the State’s job to rob us on behalf of addicts?

Undeserving Poor Latest: Abusers of illegal drugs in this country receive something like £1.7 billion a year in benefits, from you and me. £730 million alone is squandered on giving methadone to people who have chosen to ruin their lives (and those of everyone who knows them) by taking illegal heroin.

The figures are revealed and explained by Kathy Gyngell today in a devastating pamphlet, Breaking The Habit. The logic behind this seems to be that if the State robs you on the drug-users’ behalf, they won’t need to burgle your house or mug you. Something wrong here?

************At last the monstrous myth of ‘ADHD’ and the unspeakable drugging of healthy children is being questioned. It’s a small start, but the Association of Educational Psychologists is calling for a review into the use of Ritalin on children, many as young as five. Not a moment too soon. There are now nearly 700,000 prescriptions being handed out each year. Which Minister will risk the wrath of the mighty and spiteful Ritalin lobby by launching such an inquiry?

**************Idiots like Joanne Fraill shouldn’t be allowed to sit on juries. Yet she did, and contacted the defendant via Facebook, the Morons’ Directory. How couldn’t she have realised this was wrong? Isn’t it time we introduced a much higher minimum age and a serious education qualification for jurors, many of whom are not fit to go out on their own, let alone decide the fate of a fellow creature?

***********Still they won’t admit the real reason for the abolition of weekly bin collections. So I’ll say it again. It’s the European Union Landfill Directive, stupid.

Share this article:

13 June 2011 4:08 PM

Is there any point in public debate, in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

Sometimes I wonder.

I asked a simple question in my main column item – about why Christians, in their charitable work and in their engagement with wider politics, should make no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

I produced two unambiguous quotations from scripture which clearly permit, and indeed demand, such a distinction. It would be odd if they did not. The idea that someone could live comfortably at the expense of his fellow men , when he was able to work, would have been so unthinkable to any previous civilisation that it would have been regarded as absurd.

The real question is whether the modern creation of a large welfare-dependent class in our society is an improvement on the past, or a worsening if the human condition. I tend to think it is the latter, and to blame many of the faults of our cruel, coarse, disorderly society on the extension of welfare to people who do not really need it , and the reclassification of human weaknesses and failures as incurable ‘disabilities’ which must be indulged. In some ways worse, these failings (drug-taking, drunkenness etc) are equated with genuine disabilities which are not in any way the fault of the sufferer.

But my critics don’t take this up. Some go into diversions about the rich. Well, if the rich start claiming welfare payments, or evading the taxes they are legally obliged to pay, then I’ll start condemning them for it. But if not, they’re not part of the argument. The rich ( I know this annoys communist levellers, but it’s true) spend their own money. Welfare recipients spend other people’s money, taken from those other people by taxation under the threat of imprisonment.

Then I was accused of indulging in theology, by atheistical logic-choppers and show-offs who have swallowed R.Dawkins and A.C.Grayling, and long to lure me into some futile dispute on a subject which doesn’t interest me and in which I’m not versed – not because they actually wish to debate the subject, or would ever concede their position as a result of argument, but because they wish to show off. No dice, guys.

I think this is in any case mistaken. Theology is to do with the philosophical arguments for religion as such. I wasn’t making any. I never do. My only point is that we are free to choose whether to believe or not, as I have many times explained here. Quite a lot of my opponents actually seek to deny this choice by various means, which generally have little to do with facts or logic.

The most I could be accused of here is internal scriptural exegetics, aimed only at people who already accept the Christian faith, and at one who, in the Archbishop’s case, is its chief representative in this country. The quotations I produced from Holy Writ are wholly unambiguous and can only be interpreted in one way. They are also from the New Testament, uncomplicated by the supersession of many Old Testament laws by the new covenant.

None of the other hostile comments addressed this simple point – that there are different sorts of poor people, and it is reasonable for Christians to distinguish between them.

My own view is that those who needlessly throw themselves on the charity of others are active thieves from the poor (who are in the end the main source of both tax and charity) and frauds on goodness, who poison the wells of generosity and altruism, and their actions cry out for justice. This does not in any way affect my belief in charity as a duty.

Likewise, nothing I said from the Question Time platform in Norwich is specially controversial. Most serious persons agree that much foreign aid is wasted, misdirected and misappropriated. Some does positive harm. The late (Lord) Peter Bauer, who knew more about this than all of us put together, did say what I quoted him as saying. The proportion of our aid budget which is controlled by the EU is as I said ( I confirmed the figures with Mr Mitchell’s department that morning, and he told me he had personally signed off on the answer).

Yet I was treated as if I had said all aid should be stopped, which I didn’t say, and don’t believe.

Likewise it is true that our society was until the 1960s a sexually restrained and puritan one, and that it changed largely because an active and persuasive minority wanted it to change, though many others have since decided that they, too, approve. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest (my main point) that the sexualisation of children is a consequence of that . It is undeniable that sexually charged and explicit material pours out of the radio , the TV and the Internet.

As for sex education, much of it is aimed at overcoming the inhibitions of pupils about what many of them reasonably regard as private or embarrassing matters (the use of joke words for body parts in class, etc). It is perfectly reasonable to describe this as taking away the innocence of those exposed to it. As I have said before, if any adult apart from a teacher said these things and illustrated these acts in front of our children, mobs of News of the World readers would be breaking their windows and demanding they be sent to jail forever. As it is, they’re paid to do it by the taxpayer.

Sex education was originally devised by George Lukacs, as education commissar during the brief Hungarian Revolution, to debauch the minds of religiously-brought-up children. When it was first introduced in this country it was purely biological, and heavily circumscribed. It is only as the power of parents has declined, and that of social workers and teachers increased, that (under the excuse of combating disease and under-age pregnancy) it has been permitted to become so explicit and to be based on the assumption (itself both false and morally questionable)that the young will have sex outside marriage whatever anyone says or does.

As for my statement that the pretext for sex education is that it will prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies etc, this is demonstrably so – that is what its advocates say it is for. Equally true is my further statement that, the more sex education we have had, the more STIs and unwanted pregnancies we have had. In the absence of research into this correlation, we may only guess as to the cause of it, if any. But what is certainly true is that sex education is failing *on its own terms*.

Nothing I said was specially controversial. On Libya, many of my critics in the audience would have agreed with me if it hadn’t been me saying it. As it is they didn’t want their views expressed by such a wicked person (‘the Sunday Mail hack’).﻿

The howling intolerance of a vocal section of the audience (and the licence given to members of that audience to barrack me and interrupt me) shows how any defiance of current orthodoxy is now greeted not with argument but with rage. It is probably a good thing that there was no question about man-made global warming, or who knows what might have happened?

All this has drawn attention away from other oddities about the programme. Why does the Coalition now qualify for two members of a five-person panel? Isn’t a newly-elected MP who hasn’t risen above the rank of Parliamentary Private Secretary a bit junior for such a task? And why was the Labour Party represented by a man who, while a heavyweight politician, is no longer even in Parliament? Wasn’t anyone in the Shadow Cabinet available or able?

I should not here how grateful I am for the kind letters and e-mails I have received from viewers who felt that I had been unfairly treated, or needlessly abused. I can’t really complain for myself – if I couldn’t take a joke, I shouldn’t have joined, and I’ve experienced far worse than that in TV studios and elsewhere. It is a reasonable price to be paid for getting on to the most powerful medium of modern times, which conservatives have to use if they can, whatever they may think of it. The real sufferers from the unfairness and the abuse are not me, but the BBC licence-payers who are entitled to more respect for their opinions.

Share this article:

11 June 2011 8:38 PM

Why is it so bad to draw a line between the deserving and the undeserving poor? I have searched the Sermon on the Mount for the words ‘Blessed are the Spongers’ and I cannot find them – or anything remotely like them.

So why does the Archbishop of Canterbury speak as if it was obvious that we should treat people who can work, but won’t, in the same way as we treat those who are truly in need?

As Dr Williams has decided to take up political commentating, I think I shall do a little bit of Archbishoping. Here beginneth the first lesson: In St Paul’s first epistle to Timothy, Chapter 5, we read: ‘If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’

And in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, St Paul rubs it in, in that way he has: ‘This we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’

This seems pretty clear to me, and a dozen generations before my own knew these words by heart and lived according to them. They gave to charity and supported the helpless and needy with all their might.

But they scorned those who sought to live off others when they had no need to. Our Welfare State took much the same line until Harold Wilson ‘reformed’ it in the Sixties.

I don’t mind bishops intervening in our national life. That’s what they are for. I like having them in the House of Lords to remind us of the foundations on which our country stands. But they are not there to act as reinforcements for the Liberal Democrats. They are there to remind us that we are at heart a Christian nation and people.

They should stand up for lifelong marriage, denounce the lax treatment of wrongdoers and the neglect of their victims, condemn public drunkenness, defend unborn babies against those who wish to kill them, stand in the way of stupid and unjust wars, and of selfish cruelty of all kinds. But they really have to get out of their heads the idea that the Welfare State must be unconditionally defended.

For it is the hard-working poor who pay for it, and who see their near neighbours living lives of shameless idleness on their money. And they also watch criminals profiting by their crimes, and getting away with it.

If the parsons, pastors, priests and bishops of this country took the side of the poor against these parasites, instead of acting as their spokesmen, they might find their churches filling up again.

But as long as they talk like the TUC, they will stay at the fringe of our national life.

How I was banned from giving blood by (you guessed it) a Brussels decree

You've heard of trying to get blood out of a stone. But these days it isn’t much harder than trying to give blood to our national transfusion service. I have been a blood donor since I was a student, and I recommend that everyone who can become one does so. But why do they make it so difficult?

I turned up for a long-booked session the other day, and dutifully answered all the intrusive questions about my illegal drug use, needle-sharing and so on.

They asked me about my sexual habits too. You can’t leave this questionnaire around where children will see it, it’s so explicit. Anyway, surely anyone irresponsible and wicked enough to give blood after doing such things is also capable of lying on a form.

As usual, I was taken into a side room for the final interrogation. Had I been abroad? Yes. Where? Inner Mongolia. No interest. And the United States. Suddenly my interviewer became alert. How long ago had I returned? About a week. Terribly sorry, but you can’t give blood today. Come back in three weeks.

I bridled. I go, in my work, to quite a lot of dirty and diseased places. For some of them I have nasty injections.

For others I swallow unpleasant malaria pills, and cart around a jar of repellent, a double-strength can of Insect Doom and a portable net. I even wear a hat. You should have seen me in the Congo with my trousers stuffed into my socks and my hat crammed down to my ears, hunting behind the loo at bedtime for the cunning mosquito that always hides there.

I would understand it if they didn’t want my blood for a bit after that, and I wouldn’t offer it. But the USA? If it’s so dangerous, why wasn’t I warned? And why didn’t the nosey questionnaire mention this problem either? I had got up at 5.30 that morning to be sure to reach the clinic on time.

A spokesman tells me that there is an ‘epidemic’ of West Nile Fever in North America. Well, it all depends what you mean by epidemic. The United States has a population of 311 million. Last year, the entire country had 629 serious cases of this virus – 144 of them fatal.

In 24 of the 50 states, there were no deaths at all. Five states had only one death each; another five only two.

Until a few years ago, the National Blood Service didn’t have a ban of this kind, but instead tested donors who had been to the US. They found precisely no cases. I might add that there were precisely no cases of West Nile in this country in 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2010. There was one in 2006 (from Canada) and one in 2007 (also from Canada).

Epidemic? Anyway, I hadn’t been bitten by a mosquito. If I am, even here, I am sore for weeks afterwards, and so I surely would have noticed. But the rule is absolute. Staff have no discretion at all.

And I eventually found out why, but only by diligent searching, armed with the knowledge that the Brussels maggot would probably be wriggling around somewhere at the heart of this mess.

Nobody in this country has any discretion or control over this rule, because it was made by the EU, our real government. Directive 2004/33/EC of March 22, 2004, over which you, I, the Blood Service and Parliament have no control, demands this concrete-headed regulation. So, it’s true. Brussels banned me from giving blood.

I wonder just how many other stupid rules of this kind have the same origin, without us knowing.

***************War on drugs latest. The vicious persecution of innocent dope-smokers continues, or does it? William Marsh, caught with nearly one pound and two ounces of cannabis (worth £5,000), plus a set of scales, received a suspended prison sentence, plus some community service, meaning he was let off, at Liverpool Crown Court. This was despite five previous convictions, including one for cannabis possession. Official guidelines now say this great lump of poison is a ‘small quantity’.

*****************Ulster Peace latest. The only good argument for our squalid, cowardly pact with the criminal terror gangs of Northern Ireland was that it brought peace.

Has it?

Try these figures. More than 1,100 people on terrorist death lists in Northern Ireland are being allowed to carry guns for their own protection. Bombing incidents are at their highest level in eight years – 100 in 2010-11. Terrorist attacks are going virtually unsolved – 12 of 272 such attacks between 2008 and 2010 have been solved. The number of people claiming to have been driven out of their homes rose by a third in 2009-10. Terrorist and sectarian intimidation was cited in 85 per cent of these cases. And sectarian incidents rose from 1,595 in 2008-09 to 1,840 in 2009-10 – a 15 per cent increase. Sectarian crimes in the same period went up from 1,017 to 1,264 – a 24 per cent increase.

04 June 2011 8:26 PM

I regret to inform you that you are an extremist, bonkers, a spittle-flecked member of the lunatic fringe.

That is because you agree with me that Wayne Bishop, whose triumphantly smirking, selfish face looks out at us from amid his terrifying brood of children, ought to be breaking rocks on Dartmoor instead, and to hell with his ‘right’ to a family life.

Bishop is a burglar. He is also a menacing lout who badly needs to learn some lessons in manners, but never will. We’ve all seen faces like that and learned to cross the street, or shift down the bus, to avoid them when we see them coming. Some people, and God help them, cannot avoid them because they live next to them.

Bishop is the sort of person the law, the police and the prisons were invented to deal with and who – in a sharp break with normal practice – was actually locked up. As the Ministry of Injustice finally admitted last week, it is harder by far to get into prison than it is to get into university.

Here are the figures, which should be tattooed on the foreheads of every member of the Cabinet so we are constantly reminded of how useless they all are: ‘96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious “indictable” offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers.

‘Of those, only 36 per cent –around 34,600 offenders – were given immediate custody.’ So even after 15 or more previous offences, they won’t put most of them away.

So it’s almost an irrelevance that Bishop has been let out of prison in the name of his Human Wrongs. It is amazing that he was inside in the first place.

You are (for the moment) allowed to laugh at this, or to complain about it. But if, like me, you actually want to do anything about it, then you become an extremist, bonkers, spittle-flecked, lunatic etc.

Because against you, you will find all three major parties, most especially the treacherous, slippery and dishonest Tories, the BBC, the legal profession, the police and the Church of England.

They believe the system that allows Wayne Bishop and his many friends to smirk at you while they live off you is a good system. They think you are cruel, crude, outrageous and uncivilised to want a justice system that punishes bad people swiftly in ways they won’t forget.

Well, Wayne Bishop is the result of all their compassion and kindness and, as I grow older and nastier, I can’t help wishing that the people who created him could be forced to go and live next door to him for the rest of their natural lives.

But then, I’m an extremist. And if you hate the way people such as Wayne Bishop are caressed by our society, why do you keep voting for the Tories who help to caress him, and do nothing to rescue you from him and from people like him?

The second-rate celebrity dopes

The demand for the weakening of our already feeble, unenforced anti-drug laws must surely be wrong if it has supporters such as these: here they are, the Celebrity Dopes – Bob Ainsworth, the worst Defence Secretary in our history, who sent better men than him to die in Afghanistan, without even being able to explain what they were doing there.

A pop star so pretentious he seems to think he is a nettle, or perhaps a wasp.

Dame Judi Dench, an actress who believes mistakenly that because she spends her life uttering other people’s grand sentiments on stage, she is clever.

Tom Lloyd, a disgraced ex-copper who, as they say politely, ‘resigned amid claims’ that he got drunk and sexually harassed a woman at a police conference.

And that was after going on holiday during the biggest and most serious murder case his force ever investigated.

Then there’s that vague, bearded businessman Sir Richard Branson, who once told us to join the euro (what a mind!) and whose irritatingly bad trains proved he wasn’t as brilliant as he was cracked up to be.

I’ve explained the real situation, face to face, to a couple of these people. I told them, with facts and figures, how the ‘war on drugs’ that they rail against was called off in 1972.

They took not a blind bit of notice. So let’s try this instead. I hope all these second-rate dupes learn, before it is too late and at first hand, the tear-stained consequences of the wicked policy they now promote.

BBC’s only taboo c-word is ‘conservative’

Every few weeks a reader writes to me to tell me that the BBC has brushed aside a reasonable complaint. They send me the fat-bottomed, complacent responses, and they share with me their frustration that, in the end, the BBC is accountable to nobody.

But Colin Harrow’s story was exceptional. Colin likes the BBC, and sees the point of it.

Like millions, he feels betrayed by the way in which the Corporation has become an active and highly committed campaigner for a social, sexual and cultural revolution that they don’t support.

It is as if a valued old friend had suddenly taken up snorting cocaine in late middle age.

But Colin really didn’t see why The News Quiz, which goes out on Radio 4 at a time when children might easily be listening, should get away with transmitting Sandi Toksvig’s crude joke, which coyly smuggled the c-word on to the air while casually insulting an entire political party (one that I don’t support), and, crucially, had been pre-approved by a senior executive.

The BBC has played a big part in normalising the f-word and so making our society a lot coarser than it was.

It is plainly itching to do the same with the c-word, as its smug, unhelpful responses to Colin Harrow show.

The details of this event – and of Mr Harrow’s patient efforts to do something about it – are in today’s Mail on Sunday, and I urge you to read them for an insight into the proud, sealed minds of those who are in control of public broadcasting in this country.

The News Quiz itself has for years been a great red boil on the BBC’s bland face, utterly biased in favour of the Left in all matters, and neither ashamed nor restrained.

No executive ever does anything about this constant, repeated breach of the Corporation’s own charter.

And when listeners try, they receive crass, unresponsive statements such as the one offered to Colin Harrow: ‘The innuendo was within audience expectations for an adultcomedy programme.’

This is simply untrue, as it obviously wasn’t within the audience expectations of Mr Harrow and, it is reasonable to assume, not within the expectations of quite a lot of other reasonable Radio 4 listeners. But he’s only a powerless licence-payer.

Does anyone believe for a moment that an innuendo of this kind, directed againstNelson Mandela or any person or body beloved by the BBC, would have been approved for transmission?

The licence fee cannot survive if the BBC continues to treat conservative men and women in this contemptuous manner.

*************************You can’t change the weather by fiddling with the barometer, and you can’t fight the sexualisation of children with symbolic, futile gestures and bans.

Once we dumped lifelong marriage, and decided that sex was just a game played for fun, like tennis, we licensed every form of sexual activity that didn’t happen to disgust us at the time.

The problem with disgust is that there’s no absolute standard for it. What people thought was disgusting 30 years ago is normal now, and what we think is disgusting now may easily be normal 30 years hence.

Our society has worked hard to destroy innocence, with explicit sex education, the abolition of taboos and the marketing of adult clothes and cosmetics to little girls.

Modesty is derided as repression. When I attacked a range of sexually knowing dolls for little girls, Slutz, I think they were called, I received angry letters from mothers saying there was nothing wrong with them. God help us. Nobody else will.